


When They Come For You

by temporalDecay



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, M/M, Masturbation, Nooks, Tentabulges, extremely explicit body horror, helmsmen - Freeform, sexual awakening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 11:21:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalDecay/pseuds/temporalDecay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sollux Captor deals with himself, his body, his powers, his ghosts and his future as a helmsman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When They Come For You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [titianArchivist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/titianArchivist/gifts), [tatterdemalionAmberite (amberite)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberite/gifts).



> This is the fic that will send me to hell. Also, seriously. Mind the warnings, the body horror is off the charts in this one.

They will not be kind, when they come for you. 

They will come and take you from your hive, from your unruly lusus and your hardworking bees, and they will not care how smart or sneaky or skilled you are. 

They will take your body and wash away your mind, scrub your skull clean of every speck of you, and make you serve them like mindless beast. 

They will not be kind, when they come for you, and by the time they are done you won’t even want to be saved. 

  


* * *

  


The world unfurls around you in neat sets of two. The world was coded in binary, because the world is made of choices and decisions and saying yes or no. You see the past and the future and hear the howling of the imminently deceased, but you hate having to explain it like that. Those are empty words, grey and lifeless and cannot hope to explain the vast, vibrant world you live in. In red and blue, everything pulses with will and will not, did and did not. 

Contrary to popular belief, you do not think you’re god, no matter how good you are at what you do. But you’re certain, more than certain, that you are god’s intended audience, because you can see the lines of code that make up the universe. Where the if and then and else articulate delicately with do and loop and repeat. The walls of your hive, the rhythmic fluttering of your bees, the waning of the moons. The world was made out of code, but just because you can see the code doesn’t mean you can change it. 

If you could change the code, you would make yourself anything but the giant or clause that you are. 

A definitive. Something certain. Something other than the perpetually vacillating mess of yes and no and maybe that you have been all your life. The only certainty you have is that you’ll change your mind eventually, because the world was coded in binary and for every yes there must be a no. 

  


* * *

  


They will not be kind, when they come for you. 

They will cut you open with utmost care, peeling skin and muscle, and press the wires into your nerves, until your body – tired and screaming and wasted – accepts them for the sake of making them stop. They will be relentless, but not foolish. They will make you bleed and cry and despair, but never even close enough to endangering you. 

They will trim away the edges, getting rid of all that is unsightly and unnecessary, and leave you a sleek, quality piece of machinery, made with the most thoughtful precision by the most experienced hands. Along your arms and your legs, you will be branded, given ports to be hooked onto your future grave. 

They will not be kind, when they come for you, but they will be tender and you will wish to die. 

  


* * *

  


The ghosts are good company. 

The screechy, senseless ones, at least. They’re not ghosts so much as future echoes of the choices yet to be made, who grow stronger or weaker the more likely or unlikely their existence is. You like the ghosts that howl and cry and rant and rave. The angry ghosts that lash out at their unfair demise. The heartbroken ghosts that tear at their faces about their gloomy luck. The deranged ghosts who can’t even form words or remember their names. They make good white noise, to help you concentrate while you work. 

You have even learned to appreciate the ghosts of yourself and your friends. The more they reach at you, tugging and begging and demanding, the more you meddle and provoke and try to tip the scales. Then they vanish, once you’ve averted their fate, and you allow yourself to fall back into obscurity again. You like your friends, they make a nice collection of colors in your trollian roster. Together you make a set of twelve, which is six times two, which fits the theme in many ways and pleases you because of it. 

You reckon, however, that you like the idea of your friends a good deal more than your friends themselves, because they don’t see the world in twos and red and blue and for all you try to reach them, you can’t quite make your words work the way you want. You can make miracles with a command terminal, but you don’t know how to make your friends smile and laugh and not feel alone. They might like you better, if you could, but they still like you enough to keep the neat set in your trollian roster. 

You have screeching ghosts and friends you only talk to when you need to keep them from dying and the symphony of the world in red and blue. 

And then there’s him. 

  


* * *

  


They will not be kind, when they come for you. 

They will lay you on the altar of their cruelty, and slice open your back with excruciating slowness. They will pull skin and flesh and bone, until your spine glistens under the lamps like the pulsing metaphor of your soul. Then they will unravel the rope of nerves, one by one, cell by cell, like an infinitely graceful drill, and make space for the cold, metal sockets that they will press in, one by one, until you’ve torn your throat and you cannot scream anymore. Then they will wind your nerves around each ring, grafting them into you until you can no longer remember what it felt like, when they weren’t there. 

They will not close you up, but keep you open. Open to their words, their commands, their mocking laughter, their obscene pride. You will be made into a trophy, an artistic piece of engineering, the pinnacle of their ingenuity. You will be a thing, a tool, a necessity. But you will not hate it or yourself or the world, because you will not be yourself anymore. And by the time they press the dripping wires, phallic and tentacle-like, into your open wounds, you will be little more than a puppet being fitted its strings. 

They will not be kind, when they come for you, and you will pass on into the legion of the forgotten, the unnamed and the unimportant on whose back the Empire rests. 

  


* * *

  


He is strange. 

Even for a ghost. Even for an echo. Even for you. 

He follows you around and smiles and frowns and _looks_ at you, like none of the others ever do. You don’t remember where he came from, when he became such an intrinsic part of your world. He talks, sometimes, in a low, tired voice that is as dry and torpid as your own. He brushes his hand across your brow, playing with your hair when it’s grown long enough you can do nothing else but cut it. 

He never makes demands of you, never tells you what you need to do to save him. You never ask. You never talk with your ghosts, if you can help it, because all of them leave eventually, whether you save them or not, moving onto the void or the afterlife. He’s stayed the longest, solid enough to even manifest in color – in red and blue and yellow – and let you feel the faintest tingle when his hands slide against your skin. 

He is you, older, withered, tired. His horns and his eyes and his crooked fangs. Even the weird slant of your ring fingers, the way they overlap your middle fingers a little when you stretch your hands out. 

You do not talk to him, not a single word, ever, and yet you know he understands. Because he’s you or the closest thing to you one can be without being you. While you’re riding the waves of a high productivity spell, cleaning around the hive and feeding the bees and your lusus; he’s there, following around and sometimes offering stray words that always feel like exactly what you need to hear. When you’re caught in the whirlpool of a depressive slump, lying on too old sopor and thinking about all those things you could be doing if only you could force yourself to move; he’s there, fingering your hair and smiling thinly with the knowledge of how you feel. 

You don’t talk to him, because he flickers sometimes, like he’s going to vanish except not, and you see the grey limb-like wires crawling up his spine, like a loving embrace that makes your gastric sack tie into knots and threaten to make you lose your lunch. 

You don’t talk to him because you want to know, more than you want anything in the world, and you’re afraid of what will happen if you ask. 

You’re as terrified of him leaving as you are of him telling you his secrets, so you focus on your coding and your friends and the ghosts that don’t make you ache with yearning to the marrow of your bones. 

  


* * *

  


They will not be kind, when they come for you. 

They will hang you up a slick, living shell, tying up the wires into a sturdier mass of bio-neural conductors that exist only to sync up with the connections grafted into you by then. You will feel your body melt into it, feel a strange soothing pleasure as you are assimilated and the first lines of code flow in to fill your pan and overwrite what little smear of tangled thoughts-feelings-self remains in it. They will raise you up, not quite standing, not quite floating, tilted forward so you look like you’re offering yourself to them, like you would willingly let them do this to you. 

And while they hold you up, secured, they will cut you open from throat to groin and watch disinterestedly as your innards spill out onto the floor. Pain will flood your senses, but there will be nothing to react to the pain, nothing left to tell muscles to flex and tense in the presence of pain. Even if they decided to afford you anesthetics by then, they wouldn’t make a difference at all. 

They will not be kind, when they come for you, and it will be the end of your being and the beginning of their corruption of your being. 

  


* * *

  


Two perigees before you turn six, you wake up to find your body invaded by an alien toxin named lust. 

It scorches everything in its path, blood curdling in your veins as your body blooms into a singularity of _want_. You make yourself get out of the recuperacoon and trail sopor all the way into the ablution trap. The pounding of water on your back wakes you up entirely, but does nothing to quench the lust. You look down your body, water echoing against the tiles, and see your bulges engorged and completely undeterred by the shower, writhing for attention between your legs. 

You are strangely pleased to see they’re two, because everything will always be twos with you. 

Then the moment passes and you find yourself unsure of what to do. You’ve never unsheathed before, not even when you were four and precocious and scourged the internet for every possible permutation of sex available to trollkind. You know the names of each part – you know every possible name for every part, the polite ones, the common ones, the insulting ones and the ones they only use in porn and are supposed to be hot but you always found funny instead – and you know how it works and what goes where. But it’s still somewhat strange, to realize it actually happened to you. 

You still stand nearly ten full minutes, waiting for the cold shower to do its magic, and end up having to touch yourself with trepidation, fingers awkward and claws sometimes digging too hard. You touch one bulge and then the other, trying to classify the sensations and rank the sensitivity of each area, but halfway through your second stroke on the second one – twos, twos, always and everything in twos – you choke on a breath and feel your nook clench and a strange, slimy warmth dripping down your thighs. It’s pale, nearly translucent, and resists the pull of water so you have to scrub it off as your bulges go limb and bloodless before they fold away back inside you. Only once you’re clean, it occurs to you to taste it, like you’ve seen countless people do in movies, but it’s too late and your curiosity is not strong enough to make you try to arouse yourself again. 

You dry yourself and dress in freshly laundered clothes – there’s nothing nicer than the scent of dried soap trapped in the fabric – and for some reason, avoid looking at him as you go about your routine. 

  


* * *

  


They will not be kind, when they come for you. 

They will rearrange your organs, add shortcuts and replace the obsolete. Four ribs will be sacrificed for the sake of a more efficient system to pour oxygen directly into your veins and a vessel where they’ll pour preprocessed nutrients for your disfigured body to absorb so that there will be little to no waste. They will cut and twist and reshape, patiently pressing slick flesh into a well-practiced arrangement to streamline every function and make it easy to maintain. 

When they’re done, they will stitch you up around valves and displays to help monitor each function. They will not touch your groin, however. Because by the time they come for you, you will have offered two full pails of genetic material to the drones, but that will not be enough. They will leave your groin intact, even leave the little clusters of nerve endings that serve as pleasure centers, because they will come and harvest you, from time to time even as you hang off the engine of a ship. They will use you for their pleasure and ensure yours so that there’s a chance come next time, in the newest clutch of eggs in the caverns, more like you are hatched. Tiny wigglers who will slowly grow and build a sense of self, with likes and dislikes, capable of pity and hate, and thought and feelings, who will one day see them when they come and not cry until it’s far too late for them to understand. 

They will not be kind, when they come for you, and even while they destroy you, they will ensure there will be more of you to destroy, even once you are gone. 

  


* * *

  


By the time you’re six, you’re comfortable with the feeling of your hand between your legs and a knee hooked up on the armrest of your chair. You’re comfortable with the occasional need for relief – of stress, of boredom, of lust, of frustration – and don’t really care if he’s watching while you do it. You still won’t talk to him, even if you moan and whimper, approaching pleasure with the same tenacity you crack coding. You stroke and press and flick and rub, for the sheer grand reason that you can. That you’re still yourself. 

When you’re done, you clean up and go back to work, decoding the glyphs and typing never ending strips of commands and variables that very slowly begin to resemble an executable file. 

You talk to your friends more often, used by now to make your words sharp and callous, content because at least they reach them well enough. You don’t bother to explain about the world in red and blue, about the voices or the ghosts. It doesn’t matter. 

You’ve learned, in detail, what the future has in store for you, but you cannot decide if you should fight it or not. You remain an or in the great web of universal code, tangled in indecision, wrecked by guilt and shame and all those things you hide behind snide, smartass remarks. 

What does it matter, in the end? What does it matter, if you’ll save the world, when the world is very much not worth saving. What does it matter, if they pity or hate you, when you know now that they are waiting for you, have been waiting for you the moment you were hatched. You are the vacillating clause, that can go one way or the other and never sets on one, but the future itself is made of stone, immovable and certain like you’ve never been. 

You will get certainty, when they come for you. 

And, as you always suspected, in certainty you will cease to exist. 

  


* * *

  


They will not be kind, when they come for you. 

They, the nebulous, shapeless figures who are hands and scalpels and nothing more, will not be kind, because kindness has no value to one like you. You are inherently broken. You must be. To see the world the way you do, to know all that you’ve learned, to feel all that you’ve experienced, and yet, destined to be theirs in the end. 

You touch yourself and imagine sometimes that someone else is doing the touching – the wordless, secret plea, pleasure coming from the one ghost that is actually strong enough for you to feel – and lay in your cradle of sopor and childish hopes, dreaming of the time they’ll come. 

They will not be kind, when they come for you, but you are almost eager for their touch, their cruelty, their ownership. You hate and love yourself, in turns, the two prongs of each or, and fantasize about the blessed release of certainty. 

  


* * *

  


They will not come for you, he tells you, the ghost of past-future you sitting on your desk. 

He caresses your hair and your face and leans in even as you feel your world imploding. The code is corrupted. There are gaping holes now, absurd imperfections that cause the whole thing to collapse in on itself. 

They will not come for you, he tells you, as the insides of your pan boil with static and you feel tiny capillaries burst under your skin, because you are his match. 

The voices are gone now, abruptly silenced after weeks of growing crescendo. The world is ending. Everything is dying. You’re dying. 

They will not come for you, he tells you, the last words you hear before you’re swallowed by the gaping void, because they came for him, so it follows that they will not come for you. 

He was the Helmsman, you will be something else. 

  


* * *

  


Your name is Sollux Captor, and you will live. 

You don’t know for how long or to what purpose, but you will live. 

And you will endeavor, in this second life of yours, to not be foolish enough to fall in love a ghost. 

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a birthday gift for the lovely and talented tAs: tatterdemalionAmberite and titianArchivist. Late, because I suck, but it's Captors and Issues and Body Horror, so here's hoping you two enjoy it.


End file.
